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How do I change the MMA-11 MMI at the most trivial level

Posted 10 years ago

I have just installed MMA-11 on my MacBook and the very first reactions I have, on a most trivial level, are these (and I cannot resolve them myself obviously):

[1] The dock icon has changed from a cool(-ish) spiky sphere to a Simpsons like starburst - yuk.

[2] Typing zero - 0 - in a notebook puts a centre dotted zero on the page - where did this come from?

I am looking forward to exploiting many of the new mathematics functionality but if anyone can help me clear up these early interface issues, I will be so grateful.

Best Wishes,

David

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POSTED BY: David Mackay
4 Replies

On the Mac, the font for Input/Output is Source Code Pro -- a distinct improvement over Courier, which had been present since version 1. On my computer, at least, the new fonts are very sharp.

The other fonts -- Arial and Gill Sans -- leave a lot to be desired. Gill Sans is OK for Titles, etc., but Arial is an ugly font for display text. However, I am sure that Arial is still being used because it is available for all platforms. I'd prefer Helvetica over Arial, but would prefer a serifed font such as Garamond (Times -- the cross platform variant) is just ugly. When I make my own stylesheets, I use Optima,which is quite elegant for both text and headings, but is not generally available on Windows or Linux.

I have suggested that Wolfram adopt Knuth's Computer Modern, which would have the additional advantage of making LaTex translation easier.

As for the icon -- on the Mac, at least, there has been a 'fashion' of making slab-style icons for most apps, so at least the new icon does not stand out as being old-fastened by current taste. Taste changes, though, and perhaps the pendulum will swing back.

Posted 10 years ago

The zero is the zero with slash typically used to distinguish it from the letter o. But I also don't like the new font. In Dr Wolfram's blog, it is said to be a crisper font:

enter image description here

But I don't find it so. On my computer (Win 7 x64) I find the fonts for input and output to be fuzzy, leading to eye strain. I would welcome a return to the last implementation.

enter image description here

Also, we still have fonts in which the letter I is indistinguishable from the numeral 1:

enter image description here

POSTED BY: David Keith

Sadly I am old enough to recall the need for a / to distinguish zero from 'oh' especially when filling in 80 column wide coding sheets for someone to translate into a deck of punched cards. Until MMA-11 I have not been confused between the two so I think that this is an unnecessary tweak (at least make it configurable via Preferences).

Given that we all look to MMA for its mathematical assistance rather than anything else, I guess this is all a bit mundane, but why did they do it? Can we ask for a small download patch to restore some of the MMA interface back to 10.4....

POSTED BY: David Mackay
Posted 10 years ago

You can change the default font back to "Courier New" by evaluating:

SetOptions[$FrontEnd, StyleHints -> {"CodeFont" -> "Courier"}]

This option isn't recognized by previous versions of Mathematica, hence it is new in version 11.0.0. It is still undocumented.

POSTED BY: Alexey Popkov
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